....even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies... 2 Peter 2:1
"Winchell, unlike Agassiz, argued that evolution was the means by 
which God created our ordered world that is now teeming with life. He also taught many ideas now shown to be false.
One is he used Haeckel’s claim based on his fraudulent embryo drawings to prove ontology recapitulates phylogeny to show human fetuses successively evolved into a fish, a quadruped, a monkey, and a man, thereby rehearsing their evolutionary history (Whedon 1874, 517).
Winchell first published his pre-Adamite theory when a professor at the Methodist Vanderbilt University. The Vanderbilt administrators recognized that his theory, as detailed in Winchell’s 1874 treatise and also his 1880 pre-Adamite book, were both unbiblical and racist. (Davenport 1948, 516).
Another problem these administrators faced was the question, if Blacks were not descendants of Adam, Christ’s sacrifice would not be valid for them, thus “Black people had no claim to the messianic promise—an unacceptable postulate for Christians, even in a racist society” (Farrelly 2008, 684).
In The Shame of Tennessee, science writer Maynard Shipley wrote that the “war on evolution in Tennessee” began “when the trustees of Vanderbilt University unceremoniously dismissed Prof. Alexander Winchell from the faculty. They had been thoroughly alarmed upon discovering that an evolutionary wolf had been let loose among the Fundamentalist lambs” of Vanderbilt" (Shipley 1927, 187).
The result of his termination was “universal criticism from the
secular, and even part of the religious press” (Harrington 1891, 7).
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| A leaflet at a KKK event in Bryan, Ohio, in the late 1990s. The other side of the leaflet consisted of a long set of references from leading science journals and respected scientists supporting the claims made on the front. Of course, most all of the references were from literature printed before 1950. |
secular, and even part of the religious press” (Harrington 1891, 7).
The end result of Winchell’s attempt to harmonize evolution and theism produced a form of theistic evolution that resulted in supporting, and openly encouraging, racism in America and elsewhere.
Winchell’s fame, his description of Black inferiority, and the intensity of his disgust at miscegenation [interracial marriage] made racists “exuberant,” because they could now claim not only that science justified their racism, but it was supported by a “highly esteemed” scientist from one of the premiere American universities, the University of Michigan (Livingstone 2008, 188).
Winchell devoted lengthy expositions to Negro inferiority in his pre-Adamite essays, which were often been reprinted by the KKK.
In one such publication, Winchell wrote:
The Negroes have made us a great deal of trouble. . . . The anatomical structure of the Negro is inferior. . . . the black skin, the elongated and oblique pelvis—these are all characteristics in which, so far as the Negro diverges from the White man, he approximates the African apes . . . . I am not responsible for the inferiority of the Negro. I am responsible if I ignore the facts. I am culpable if I hold him to the same standard as the White man. (Winchell 1878, 240)
His Proof of Negro Inferiority book, one of the most popular racist booklets still in use today, is complete with pictures purportedly showing how close Negro brains are to ape brains and Negro-face profiles are to ape-face profiles (Winchell 1982). The book, reprinted a few years ago by a white supremacist group, concludes that the Negro race is biologically inferior, and that the Hottentots are biologically close to gorillas."
AIG